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The Social and The Real:
Political Art of the 1930s
in the Western Hemisphere

edited by Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg

Introduction
Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg

The Social and the Real is the first anthology to deal with the painting, sculpture, graphic arts, and photography of the 1930s in a hemispheric context. We take as axiomatic Cuban poet, journalist, and political theorist José Martí’s (1853–95) definition of “America” as a hemispheric, multiracial, and multiethnic entity in which the United States is one nation among many. Although many of the individual essays have a relatively narrow focus, as an aggregate they begin the process of forging a Pan-American perspective on the art of the period, encouraging the reader to compare and contrast the experiences of artists across national boundaries and reconsider familiar narratives. Thinking about art and politics in a hemispheric context expands the very chronology of social realism. Whereas scholars in the United States locate the origins of the movement with the economic crash of 1929 and conclude it with the advent of World War II, the story really begins in Mexico in the early 1920s and continues during the 1940s and 1950s throughout the hemisphere.

There were numerous threads of contact between artists throughout the Americas. These included artistic inspiration through the reproduction and dissemination of images, artists either traveling to, working in, or exhibiting in countries other than their own, or inviting foreign artists to work with them, as with the numerous artists who assisted or worked with the Mexican muralists in either Mexico or the United States. Artists’ organizations were important sites of contact, among them the American Artists’ Congress, which convened in 1936 in New York and whose twelve delegates included José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The Mexican Artists’ Union inspired both the Artists Union and the Harlem Artists’ Guild in the United States, the Union de Escritores y Artistas in Cuba, and the Artists’ Union of Canada, whose members were involved with either the Communist Party or the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation.

It was at the 1936 American Artists’ Congress that U.S. muralist Gilbert Wilson related how two summers before he had seen Orozco’s extraordinary paintings for the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. “From that moment on I knew it was what I wanted Art to be—a real, vital, meaningful expression, full of purpose and intention, having influence and relation to people’s daily lives—a part of life. Here was the first modern art I had ever seen. At least, it was the first creative work done in my own time that seemed to have any need, any excuse for being. I decided that murals, today, can contain one of two things, either the cruelty of emptiness or the cruelty of truth.” In contrast to the rhetoric of nationalism and isolationism that was gaining increasing currency in the culture of the United States by the mid-thirties, Wilson acknowledged that the contemporary mural movement had begun in Mexico and that an art of social responsibility was in essence a Pan-American phenomenon. As artist and critic Charmion Von Wiegand wrote, “It is even possible that they [the Mexican muralists] may give us a tradition from which the American painters will draw. For, as their country like ours belongs to the New World, their work seems to be a part of our actual native expression.” As the essays in this anthology aptly demonstrate, artists throughout the hemisphere shared Wilson’s and Von Wiegand’s call for an art that was both responsive to the day-to-day struggles of the working classes and had a wide appeal. Such popular understanding did not mean sugarcoating reality; instead Wilson wanted murals that would convey the “cruelty of truth.”

It may still surprise some readers that Wilson used the word “modern” to refer to the work of the Mexican muralists who had rejected the abstraction of the European avant-garde. The supposed antimodernist quality of so much of the visual art between the wars has resulted in its neglect by an approach to art history that still favors formal invention over content, abstraction over realism. And yet all the artists discussed in The Social and the Real, no matter what their nationality or style, shared a belief that they were making art that was distinctly modern precisely because it responded directly to the political and social issues of the times. But, as Paul Wood writes, “the mere depiction of recognizable bodies doing recognizable things was not what made an art ‘realist.’” In its most cohesive and authentic visual expressions, social realism synthesized the formalist experimentation of the avant-garde with a critical interpretation of reality. Such artists as the Mexican muralists were opposed to academic naturalism because it seemed to maintain conservative values. But they were equally opposed to avant-garde forms of expression because of their supposed elitism and bourgeois individualism. Painters such as Stuart Davis in the United States, Paraskeva Clark in Canada, and Antonio Berni in Argentina wanted to reconcile modernist painting with leftist ideology. The social dimension of reality and the reality of social conditions are crystallized in the most powerful art of this period.

Our focus on intrahemispheric exchange and artistic production is a break from the dominant modernist paradigm that sees art of the Americas as solely indebted and subservient to European art. This is not to deny that many artists from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America traveled to Paris and Berlin in the 1910s and 1920s for training, camaraderie, and inspiration. But their travels to these European capitals were often taken after exposure to the Mexican muralists or after having lived and worked in Russia and Eastern Europe. Artists in Latin America and the Caribbean drew upon native radical political, indigenous artistic traditions, and upon their own national and popular heroes. In sum, the art of the Western Hemisphere represents a dialogue between politics and art both within the Americas and with European modernism and politics.

However, in emphasizing Pan-Americanism, and in particular the extraordinary influence of the Mexican mural movement, we cannot ignore the economic, military, and cultural imperialism of the United States. If artists outside the United States welcomed a certain amount of cross-cultural exchange, they also wanted to protect their native art production from the culture industry of their “good neighbor.” The social and political manifestation of nationalism in Latin America and the Caribbean functioned on two levels: It sought to recover the historical past that reinforced the authenticity of indigenous artistic and social traditions (José Carlos Mariátegui’s Marxism, for example, was rooted in Incan communal social structures); and it promoted a left-wing anti-imperialist nationalism, as evident in the politics of Peru’s Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), Nicaragua’s César Augusto Sandino, Puerto Rico’s Pedro Albizu Campos, and Cuba’s Antonio Guiteras. These nationalisms throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, as seen in the visual work of Mexican, Argentinean, and Cuban artists, absorbed rather than rejected the formal experimentation of the European avant-garde, which was then transformed into a national visuality that was neither chauvinistic nor nativist. The stylistic example of Diego Rivera, with its linear composition, bright colors, and didactic narrative, had repercussions in the Caribbean and the Andean countries. Rivera’s heterodox politics (he evolved from Lovestone to Trotsky to Mao in a little more than a decade) was not as influential as that of Siqueiros, which was grounded in the Communist Party network throughout the Americas. Of the three great muralists (los tres grandes), Siqueiros traveled the most throughout the Americas, lecturing, publishing articles, and conducting workshops. While his “dialectic-subversive painting” alienated potential followers with its communist dogmatism, his sculptural sense of form found adherents in Berni (Argentina) and Mario Carreño (Cuba). In the end, the socially engaged realism found in Latin American art between the two world wars was pluralistic in both style and content.

Historiography

Our title, The Social and the Real, is derived from the term “social realism,” which has become a standard catchall to describe the numerous public murals, graphics, and easel paintings produced between the wars that had some kind of leftist content. Social realist art tends to criticize the body politic or propose an ideal community. A term accepted both popularly and by scholars, it is vague and remains largely unexamined. The beginning of its use in the art-historical literature of the United States is hard to pinpoint. During the 1930s artists in Canada, Latin America, and the United States never referred to themselves as social realists or to their art as social realism, a fact noted by many of the essayists in this volume; nor did the critics use the term. In Canada such leftist artists as Marian Scott, Fritz Brandler, and Louis Muhlstock, working in Montreal, referred to their imagery as “proletarian art.” Charles Hill, in his Canadian Painting in the Thirties, discusses the “social function” of art with a decidedly working-class orientation. It appears that the term social realism first appeared in the Canadian art-historical literature in Barry Lord’s History of Painting in Canada: Towards a People’s Art, published in 1974. David Shapiro’s widely read and referenced Social Realism: Art as Weapon, published in 1973, has resulted in the scholarly acceptance of the term to refer to leftist art in the United States, but it has since been adopted in studies of both Canadian and Latin American art of the period.

Despite the variability of the terms by which artists referred to themselves, through their political involvement, through their imagery, manifestoes, political networks, and public demonstrations, many artists engaged in debates over the artist’s role in society, the role of the government in funding the arts, and how to create works that were both aesthetically and politically progressive. If Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco never used the term social realism, they always believed that art should have a direct political and social function, and they went so far as to embrace the word propaganda—a term always used negatively by modernist and antimodernist critics alike. As early as 1923 the manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters, and Sculptors declared: “The creators of beauty must turn their work into clear ideological propaganda for the people, and make art, which at present is mere individualist masturbation, something of beauty, education, and purpose for everyone.”

David Shapiro describes social realism in terms of socialist politics, and writes that “Social Realism attempted to use art to protest and dramatize injustice to the working class—the result, as these artists saw it, of capitalist exploitation.” Art historian Patricia Hills, a contributor to this volume, defines social realism as not so much a style but “an attitude toward the role of art in life” that emerged during the mid-1930s. Cecile Whiting suggests a more inclusive definition that includes art with “social, though not sectarian messages.” These writers emphasize the message of the art rather than its formal vocabulary, and its potential to create class consciousness that can lead to social change. Most art historians insist on a clear distinction between social realism and Socialist Realism, the officially sanctioned style of the USSR. First conceptualized in 1932 by Karl Radek and Nikolay Bukharin, the doctrine of Socialist Realism was first presented to an international audience in 1934, when Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Communist Party and Stalin’s chief cultural commissar, addressed the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow. Socialist Realism was official, academic, and controlled by the Communist International in Moscow, and according to Zhdanov was the only art appropriate to “the building of Communism.” The nomenclature social realism, by contrast, has some of the flavor of the ideals of the Popular Front. Just as the Popular Front was an attempt to put allegiance to communism aside so as to unite leftist artists and intellectuals in the struggle against fascism, social realism as a construct brings together a wide range of left-leaning artists regardless of their relationship to the Communist Party. To paraphrase cultural historian Michael Denning, social realists do not necessarily adhere to any one political dogma, but they “labor on the left.” For every Hugo Gellert, a member of the Communist Party who illustrated the writings of Karl Marx, there were many more artists like Paul Cadmus, who participated in things like the NAACP-sponsored exhibition “An Art Commentary on Lynching,” (13 February–2 March 1935), was a member of the Artists Union, and signed the 1936 call for the American Artists’ Congress. (As Jonathan Weinberg points out, Cadmus said his politics were “pinkish” rather than red, alluding archly to both his homosexuality and his political leanings.)

More troubling than the variety of terms used to describe the leftist art of the period—“social realism,” social viewpoint,” “social content,” and “proletarian art”—is the vagueness of their meanings. In 1933 Meyer Schapiro, writing under the alias “John Kwait,” complained in the New Masses about the lack of focus of the John Reed Club of New York City’s exhibition “The Social Viewpoint in Art”:

What is The Social Viewpoint in Art? It is as vague and empty as “the social viewpoint” in politics. It includes any picture with a worker, a factory or a city-street, no matter how remote from the needs of a class-conscious worker. It justifies the showing of [Thomas Hart] Benton’s painting of negroes shooting crap as a picture of negro life, or a landscape with a contented farmer, or a decorative painting labelled “French Factory.” The mere presence of such “social” elements in a picture does not indicate any social viewpoint, since these elements are often treated abstractly and picturesquely without reference to a social meaning of the objects.

Schapiro dreamed of a different exhibition, one that would include “examples of cooperative work by artists,—series of prints, with a connected content, for cheap circulation; cartoons for newspapers and magazines; posters, banners; signs; illustrations of slogans; historical pictures of the revolutionary tradition of America. Such pictures have a clear value in the fight for freedom.” He called on the John Reed Club “to offer specific tasks, especially cooperative tasks, to the revolutionary artist.” Jacob Burck defended the exhibition from Schapiro’s attack, insisting that the goal was “to rally all artists whose sympathies are swinging leftward. It served its function well historically by making a thorough resume of this new development among the artists. Until the economic crisis, art (painting, sculpture) was entirely a snobbish, individualistic expression based on the ‘gold standard’ of bourgeois society. The ‘social viewpoint’ in politics, is of course absurd, but the social viewpoint in art is a decided change leftward from its former one of ‘bananas and prisms.’”

We find ourselves in sympathy with both positions. On the one hand it seems absurd to limit the discussion to works by those relatively few artists in the Western Hemisphere who were self-consciously communist. At the same time, like Schapiro, we are worried by the vagueness of the terms used to designate and understand the art of the left. Recognizing that the term social realism was not contemporary, we wished to pull the term apart and examine its two separate components—the first indebted more to the realm of politics and sociology, and the second to nineteenth-century literary and artistic traditions. And so we challenged the authors of this anthology to rethink some aspect of the crucial words “social” and “real.” How did government and community function in the career of individual artists? What role did a conception of “the masses” or “the proletariat” play in the artist’s understanding of his or her task? Do works of art from the period simply mirror powerful economic and social forces, or did they accomplish political work, causing people to think and act differently, creating a lasting impact on the social structure? To what degree was representation itself understood to be a matter of ideological struggle, so that the work of art conveyed not only the truth of everyday life but also the mechanisms of truth telling?

By inviting essayists to reconsider the meaning of both the social and the real, we asked that they broaden the social issues of the era beyond the dominant one of class and labor. In the end, such reconsideration brings into question the “realness” of the artists’ social vision, which often projected utopian social ideals—active healthy workers at a time of mass unemployment, racially harmonious workforces despite heightened racial conflict, and the absence of images of women as wage earners and laborers. The contributors to this anthology explore how the representation of race, gender, and sexuality operates within the visual culture of the period and how these things interacted with the class struggle.

The Essays

We have grouped the fourteen essays that follow into major themes to identify key issues raised by the authors. These themes should be considered borders to be crossed, as we encourage readers to draw their own connections between the essays. In Part I, “Representing the Nation: Reality and Authenticity,” five writers consider what artists, audiences, and patrons perceived to be stylistic and thematic realism. While many artists were committed to social values that transcended that of the nation-state, their artistic production was still rooted in and informed by their country’s immediate social conditions.

As Alan Trachtenberg writes in “Signifying the Real: Documentary Photography in the 1930s,” during the Great Depression and the “breakdown of the world’s greatest industrial society,” photography emerged as the leading documentary medium. The “non-style” photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and others showing the destitute and the dustbowl came to define reality. Photography reached such prominence because the public needed to believe in the veracity of the artists’ vision; photography, in turn, could not fulfill its documentary mission without the public’s confidence. The task of documentary photography became to locate, recover, and preserve the “real” America in order to assure the nation’s future.

Likewise, Cuban modernist artists, who shared with the rest of their generation a yearning for national sovereignty, sought to represent and define national culture by isolating what was authentically Cuban. They accomplished this, writes Juan A. Martínez in “Social and Political Commentary in Cuban Modernist Painting of the 1930s,” by choosing as their subject matter Cuban peasants, the Afro-Cuban, the industrial worker, and such national heroes as José Martí. Sharing Trachtenberg’s concern with the connection between artist and audience, Martínez questions the social role of images of “authentic Cuba,” since these paintings primarily reached the white middle class and elite segments of society.

Mary K. Coffey’s “The ‘Mexican Problem’: Nation and ‘Native’ in Mexican Muralism and Cultural Discourse,” examines postrevolutionary Mexico’s identification of the nation with the native, and looks at how pre-Hispanic heritage—seen as the most authentic Mexican culture—came to signify revolutionary politics.

Although the Mexican mural movement influenced artists throughout the Americas, most governments, unlike Mexico’s in the early 1920s, were not revolutionary and did not patronize leftist monumental wall art. Just as we lack an exact definition or application of the term social realism, we lack a single model for politically engaged imagery that can be applied throughout the Americas. “Canadian Political Art in the 1930s,” by Marylin McKay, draws attention to artists who operated on the left but ultimately argues for a standard of political imagery internal to Canada. Overall, Canadian social realism displayed more “reserve and restraint,” than that of other nations, writes McKay.

“Adapting to Argentinean Reality: The New Realism of Antonio Berni” likewise traces both the intellectual and stylistic formation of painter Antonio Berni against the backdrop of 1930s Argentinean social realities. Berni, as Alejandro Anreus writes, developed his vision of a critical social realism based on his own brand of heterodox Marxism, which he derived from the necessary adaptation of Marxist principles to the realities of contemporary Argentinean life.

The visual culture of social realism was in large measure a masculine enterprise—most of the artists, critics, political leaders, government patrons, and officials were men; much of the cultural discourse centered on male achievements and on the symbolic and economic value of the healthy male worker. There were of course exceptions, such as Diego Rivera’s depiction of his wife, Frida Kahlo, distributing rifles in his mural for the Ministry of Education (1923–24). The essays in Part II, “Men, Manhood, and the Male Body” explore the artistic representation of the male body and masculinity in social realist prints, paintings, and sculpture. Jonathan Weinberg’s “I Want Muscle” can be considered a corrective to current art-historical literature, which acknowledges the centrality of the male worker image but circumvents the obvious erotic charge of such images. Regardless of the gender or sexual orientation of the artist, in a wide range of social realist productions there is a quality of muscular excess that suggests an emotional investment in the male form. What was the appeal of the hypermasculine worker during this period, asks Weinberg, and how was the lingering focus on the male physique seen as appropriate? Further, what was the tension between the representation of physical labor, which was valued as masculine, and that of artistic creation, which was deemed effeminate?

Jacqueline Francis draws attention to a never-realized mural project proposed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal arts projects, entitled Negro Achievement (1934), by artists Malvin Gray Johnson and Earle W. Richardson. At the 1936 American Artists’ Congress, painter Aaron Douglas, in “The Negro in American Culture,” addressed the lack of attention paid to African American art and artists. “It is when we come to revolutionary art that we find the Negro sincerely represented,” he wrote, “but here the portrayal is too frequently automatic, perfunctory and arbitrary. He becomes a kind of revolutionary prop, a symbol, vague and abstract.” It can be argued that the denial of artistic agency and self-representation was itself a negation of manhood and of the male privilege of functioning within the public sphere, albeit one more readily grasped by white men than African American. In contrast to stereotypical social realist depictions of black men, Francis writes that Johnson and Richardson’s proposed pantheon of black male heroes established history as “the decisive action of men,” countered “accusations of black cowardice and passivity,” and showed the two artists’ investment in traditional notions of patriotism and manhood while simultaneously revealing racial violence in the United States.

An extreme example of that violence was the lynching of black men, which increased dramatically during the 1930s and which artists of diverse races and nationalities sought to protest through their work. The visual, legislative, and rhetorical discourse of both lynching and anti-lynching centers primarily on the black male body. Marlene Park examines two competing exhibitions, one organized by the John Reed Club and the other by the NAACP, that showed the response of artists to this epidemic of lynching and the fight for legislative reforms. The African American struggle for artistic and political self-representation informed both the images and the two exhibitions.

Two essays form Part III, “Labor and Labor Conflict.” The worker stood at the center of leftist visual production, just as the condition of the worker stood at the center of Marxist and socialist theories. Artists on the left envisioned their imagery—which overwhelmingly displayed workers in heavy industrial labor—as stirring class consciousness while providing, to paraphrase literary scholar Barbara Foley, an “emancipatory message.” Patricia Hills, in “Art and Politics in the Popular Front: The Union Work and Social Realism of Philip Evergood,” tells us that it was a police beating that radicalized Evergood, but that later, upon reading the news of the so-called “Memorial Day Massacre” at South Chicago’s Republic Steel Plant, Evergood painted his sharpest social realist statement, American Tragedy (1937). This expressive painting of “determined class struggle” depicts a racially diverse workforce of both men and women. But unlike Evergood’s direct statement of labor conflict and violence, Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, writes Anthony W. Lee, convey a leftist fantasy of the American worker that failed to confront American working-class racism and instead reveal Rivera’s belief in an unalienated workforce.

Whereas class is a social reality and relationship that can change, race, gender, and ethnicity are “experiential realities” that inform class relations but cannot be eradicated. Many of the essays in this volume explore the intersection of class with race, gender, and ethnicity in social realist art—Rivera’s experiences with racially charged Detroit, for example. Yet the two essays in Part IV, “Voices on the Margins,” focus specifically on marginalized identities as both producer and subject matter. Artist Paraskeva Clark, writes Natalie Luckyj, was a triple outsider to Canadian society—she was a woman, an émigré (born in Russia), and a socialist, in addition to being an artist. Clark’s paintings served as “contact zones” that enabled her to fuse public and private identities and to negotiate her outsider status. Further, Clark’s status as an “exotic outsider” permitted her to challenge the Canadian status quo and social expectations.

As Diana L. Linden writes in “Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene,” American artist Ben Shahn, who served as an assistant to Diego Rivera, was a working-class Jew who sought to represent Jewish historical experiences and political concerns in his New Deal murals. Public murals became for Shahn a forum both for representing the Jewish working class and its concerns and for literally painting Jews into the American Scene.

“Extending the Discourse,” the concluding section of the anthology, invites us to reconsider the timeframe and the endpoint of social realism, and also to acknowledge its continued impact on visual culture. Andrew Hemingway’s “Between Zhdanovism and 57th Street: Artists and the CPUSA, 1945–56,” disproves the popular misconception that the cultural movement around the CPUSA disintegrated with the Nazi-Soviet Pact and that politically motivated art went into sharp decline. Hemingway draws attention to the “institutional base through which communist and fellow-traveling artists operated in the 1940s,” and also establishes that artists and critics continued to be productive into the cold war era.

Focusing on representations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, both during his tenure and since, Sally Stein discusses the issue of physical infirmity in the 1930s and how this was managed both semiotically and politically as America’s need to stand strong and the president’s physical barriers brought the body politic and the president’s body into direct conflict. The controversies surrounding the creation of the FDR Memorial in the 1990s, which Stein charts, suggest that we are still coming to terms with the 1930s and its legacy of visual culture.